24 April 2011

It’s a great pleasure for us to welcome the students listed below into the graduate program.

Michael Clauss, mclauss@hawaii.edu, is finishing an M.A. at the University of Hawaii, where he’s working on differential case marking in Tamil, Hind, other SE Asian languages, serial verbs, pro-drop, and other issues in syntax.

Hannah Greene, Osmiroid@gmail.com, is finishing an M.A. at the University of British Columbia, where she has done fieldwork fieldwork on Kwakwala; she is interested in event semantics.

Stefan Keine, stkeine@uni-leipzig.de, we all know already. He is back at the University of Leipzig, working on formal syntax and semantics, with special interests in Chinese and in case and agreement.

Jérémy Pasquereau, jepasque@hotmail.com, is completing an M.A. at the University of Lyon and is interested in documented under-studied languages, especially languages of the Caucasus.

Shayne Sloggett, shayne.sloggett@gmail.com, graduated from UCSC and is working as a research assistant in Colin Phillip’s lab at the University of Maryland, with interests in syntax, psycholinguistics, and their interaction.

We look forward to seeing all of them in August or September.

Amanda Rysling, ajrysling@gmail.com, who is completing her B.A. at NYU, has also been accepted into the Fall class, but she will defer matriculation until the fall of 2012 so that she can accept a Fulbright Fellowship to Poland for 2011-12. Ms. Rysling is interested in experimental approaches to phonology and phonetics, and in Polish.

Joe Pater and I have a NSF grant that includes funding to provide summer research experience for undergraduate linguistics majors. It pays a stipend of $1500. To participate, you would need to be living in the area for most of the summer.

To apply, write to Joe and me listing the linguistics courses you've taken, the grades you've received, and the names of one or two of our faculty who are most familiar with your work. If you have computer, lab, or statistics skills, please include that information with your application.

The deadline for applications is April 26. Students graduating or leaving at the end of this semester are ineligible -- sorry.

Alice Harris will be presenting to the psycholinguistics group Monday April 25th at 6 pm in rm. 301 of South College. The title and abstract are below. All are welcome - pizza will be served at 6, and the talk will get underway shortly thereafter. The acquisition group will also be meeting that evening starting at 5:15, and the groups will merge over pizza.

Perception of Exuberant Exponence in Batsbi: Functional or Incidental?

Alice C. Harris (work done with Arthur Samuel)

The term “exuberant exponence” refers to the occurrence of more than two markers (exponents) of a feature or bundle of features within a single word, as in this example from Batsbi (Nakh-Daghestanian, severely endangered): d-ex-d-o-d-anŏ ‘evidently they are tearing down’, where each instance of d- realizes the gender and number of the object. While multiple exponence is seen in this example, some verbal lexemes in the language govern no gender-number marking at all, some one exponent, and some two. In a series of three experiments, we compare verbs that have no agreement marker with ones that have a single marker, and we compare verbs with one agreement marker with ones that have two. We find that word recognition is slower with agreement than without it; words with two agreement markers are recognized more slowly and with more errors relative to verbs with a single marker. For grammaticality judgments, subjects were generally slower to respond when the verb carried more markers. For verbs with no marker versus verbs with one marker, this extra cognitive effort yielded improved accuracy; however, this advantage did not extend to multiple exponence, as the extra processing time did not produce much improvement in accuracy. In cued recall, the presence of one marker conferred a clear advantage in accuracy, but the presence of two agreement markers actually resulted in decreased accuracy. Overall, multiple exponence was found not to confer a functional advantage.

On Tuesday April 26th the McCarthy-Pater grant group will meet at 4 pm in SC 301 to discuss goals for future development of OT-Help. For those of you who have been working with the software, please classify your suggestions on the 6-point scale below.

On Tuesday May 3rd at 10 am the Experimental Phonology Working Group will hear a presentation by Michael Becker and Lena Fainleib on "The naturalness of product-oriented generalizations". A draft of the paper can be found here (http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=1036).

OT-Help Wishlist

1 - I needed this feature for something and was inconvenienced by not having it.2 - I wanted this feature but got by without it3 - I want this feature4 - I think this feature is a good idea5 - I need this feature but I can get it elsewhere6 - I want this feature but I can get it elsewhere

Lynne Murphy, University of Sussex and former UMass undergraduate, has a (almost new) book on Lexical Meaning, published by Cambridge University Press. You can find out more about Prof. Murphy from her blog:

Plenary Speaker:Cornelia Hamann, University of Oldenburg"Bilingual development and language assessment"

Lunch Symposium: "Morphology in second language acquisition and processing"Harald Clahsen, University of Essex/University of PotsdamHolger Hopp, University of MannheimDonna Lardiere, Georgetown UniversitySilvina Montrul (organizer), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Submissions that present research on any topic in the fields of first and second language acquisition from any theoretical perspective will be fully considered. Eligible topics include: Bilingualism, Cognition and Language, Creoles and Pidgins,Dialects, Discourse and Narrative, Gesture, Hearing Impairment and Deafness, Input and Interaction, Language Disorders, Linguistic Theory, Neurolinguistics, Pragmatics,Pre-linguistic Development, Reading and Literacy, Signed Languages, Sociolinguistics, and Speech Perception and Production.

We have begun accepting abstract submissions.Please check http://www.bu.edu/bucld/ for a link to the submission form and any important updates.

DEADLINE: All submissions must be received by 8:00 PM EDT, May 15, 2011.

FURTHER INFORMATIONGeneral conference information is available at:http://www.bu.edu/bucld/Boston University Conference on Language Development96 Cummington Street, Room 244Boston, MA 02215U.S.A.Questions about abstracts should be sent to abstract@bu.edu

This single day workshop aims to build connections between computational, experimental, and grammar-based research on phonetics and phonology. Studies using each of these general methodologies often have similar goals and produce mutually informing results, but they are usually presented in distinct journals and conferences, creating a barrier to their integration. The workshop brings together researchers in the areas of speech production, speech perception, and modeling of language acquisition.

In addition to the spoken sessions (see below), a poster session will be held during the workshop. We invite submission of abstracts reporting computational, experimental, and grammar-based research on phonetics and phonology.

Abstracts should be a one-page .pdf file, formatted at minimum 12-point single-spaced with 1 inch margins. Tables, graphs and references can be on a separate page. Abstracts must be submitted electronically to lsa2011-workshop@ling.northwestern.edu. Deadline for submissions: May 1, 2011.